In the story of the new Apple Silicon powered Mac Pro, the last thing we learnt was that it would be delayed until 2023. Now we learn that it won’t have as much power as we expected and won’t carry the ‘Made in USA’ label when it is released. We have the details.

The Story of The Apple Silicon Mac Pro So Far…

At the Mac Studio launch event back in March 2022, Apple made it clear that the Studio was not a Mac Pro replacement. Apple senior vice president of Hardware Engineering John Ternus confirmed that a Mac Pro is coming "another day" to clear up any confusion about the future of the Mac Pro product line.

Interestingly, Mark Gurman revealed a tidbit about the Mac Pro development in his interview on YouTube with Vadim Yuriev, saying…

“They also had an M1 Mac Pro ready to go months ago. But they scrapped that to wait for the M2 version.”

In June 2022, we learned that Apple has been testing a Mac Pro, codenamed J180. This machine is expected to include a successor to the M1 Ultra chip used in the Mac Studio computer.

When it comes to design, it is being suggested that the new Mac Pro will only see a few design changes, with the main change being getting rid of the current Intel Xeon chips as part of its plan to make the entire range of Mac computers powered by Apple silicon.

In the WWDC 2020 keynote address, Apple said that the Apple silicon transition would take two years. However, with the passing of WWDC 2022 in June, it’s now more than two years since Apple announced the transition from Intel to its own chips. Even if we start the clock from the point that the first Apple Silicon Macs were announced in October 2020, it’s still more than two years from that point.

Even though Apple teased a new Mac Pro at the Peek Performance event in March 2022, the current Mac Pro is still running on Intel chips.

As to when to expect the new Apple silicon-powered Mac Pro, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo tweeted that a new Mac Pro would ship in 2023.

However, Mark Gurman had a slightly different take on this. In his interview with YouTuber Vadim Yuriev, Mark said that he thinks the Apple silicon-powered Mac Pro will ultimately be announced at the end of the year and then released in 2023.

In his October 23rd Power On Newsletter, Mark said this about the new Apple Silicon Mac Pro…

“Onto the Mac Pro. That new high-end machine will include chip options that are at least twice or four times as powerful as the M2 Max. Let’s call those chips the M2 Ultra and the M2 Extreme. My belief is that the Mac Pro will be offered with options for 24 and 48 CPU cores and 76 and 152 graphics cores—along with up to 256 gigabytes of memory.

In fact, I can share one configuration of the Mac Pro in active testing within Apple: 24 CPU cores (16 performance and 8 efficiency cores), 76 graphics cores and 192 gigabytes of memory. That particular machine is running macOS Ventura 13.3.“

One week later, in the October 30th edition of his Power On newsletter, Mark Gurman had this to say about the only Mac that is yet to see an Apple Silicon version, the Mac Pro…

“The first Apple Silicon Mac Pro is clearly running behind the company’s own self-imposed timeline. When it announced the transition to homegrown chips in 2020, Apple said the move would take about two years. The revamped Mac Pro, coming next year, will clearly miss that schedule.

But I think we have a pretty clear reason why, and it’s not a bad thing: The machine will be superior to what Apple originally intended to offer.

As I wrote recently, my belief is that the first non-Intel Mac Pro will have options for 24 and 48 CPU cores and 76 and 152 graphics cores—along with up to 256 gigabytes of memory.”

What Has Changed Now?

Back in June 2022, we learned that the Apple Silicon-powered Mac Pro was also expected to offer the option of the M2 Extreme, which is expected to be two M1 Ultra chips combined, just like the M1 Ultra is two M1 Max chips put together. Using the M2 Extreme would offer a beast of a machine with the following spec…

• 40-core CPU (32 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores)

• Up to 128-core GPU

• Up to 64-core Neural Engine

• Up to 256GB of RAM

• 1,600GBps memory bandwidth

This would enable Apple to offer two Apple Silicon powered Mac Pro desktop computers…

1. An M2 Ultra option with 24CPU cores, 152 graphic cores and up to 192GB of unified memory.

2. An M2 Extreme option with 48 CPU cores and 152 graphic cores.

However, in the December 18th issue of his Power On newsletter, reliable source Mark Gurman from Bloomberg announced that…

“The company has likely scrapped that higher-end configuration, which may disappoint Apple’s most demanding users — the photographers, editors and programmers who prize that kind of computing power.

The company made the decision because of both the complexity and cost of producing a processor that is essentially four M2 Max chips fused together. It also will help Apple and partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. save chip-production resources for higher-volume machines”

There have also been concerns that if Apple hadn’t done something, the Mac Pro price would be so high that very few people would want to buy it.

“Based on Apple’s current pricing structure, an M2 Extreme version of a Mac Pro would probably cost at least $10,000 — without any other upgrades — making it an extraordinarily niche product that likely isn’t worth the development costs, engineering resources and production bandwidth it would require.”

Instead, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman believes that the new Apple Silicon powered Mac Pro, when it is released in 2023, will rely on the M2 Ultra SoC but still retain its unique features offering easy expandability.

Apple To Change Where The Mac Pro Is Manufactured

For US customers, the current Intel powered Mac Pro is assembled in a factory in Austin, Texas. However, it should be noted that the parts used in the US factory are made in China, including the main internal components, power supply and case.

Mark Gurman goes on…

“The company made the decision to do the assembly in Texas in 2019, when it was facing political pressure from the Trump administration. Apple had planned to build the Intel Mac Pro in China, but moved the final steps to the US as an olive branch.

At the time, Donald Trump threatened Apple with significant tariffs on goods built in China. That could have increased costs and complicated the production of key devices like the iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. Turning the low-volume Mac Pro into a PR exercise was a small price to pay to avoid that.

Now that Trump is out of office, the company can more safely move Mac Pro production into its comfort zone — Asia — and avoid the false idea that the Mac Pro is a true “Made in America” product.”

Note that the move is not back to China, where most iPhone models and other products are manufactured, but to Asia, with the new Mac Pro like to be produced in Vietnam, reducing Apple’s dependence on China.